So, if you could do it all again, would you have waited, or taken the first opportunity offered to you by a Big name comic industry insider?

I would have waited, and here’s why.

Mentoring is a nice thing, a fine thing, and it’s usually done with good intentions. BUT, it puts a stigma on the mentored writer. That person is forever seen as someone who was given a shortcut, who got a golden ticket. Even if they do brilliant stuff and work hard, they can often be seen as just a shadow of the person who mentored and championed them.

I think, if I am going to do creative stuff, I want to earn it. I’m quite certain that (hate to bring this up but it’s true), as a woman, that would be a stick critics would beat me with for a long time. “She couldn’t break in on her own, she had to get help from _____.”

A perfect case in point for me is Devin Grayson.

Now, Devin did everything the right way, the hard way. She established contact with a bat editor, she worked for TWO SOLID YEARS writing pitches and making adjustments before she got work. Think about that, think about starting writing something today and working for TWO YEARS on it, with no hope of getting paid and no assurance it would even get read.

When she finally got her chance, she wrote BRILLIANT stuff that got her noticed immediately. She bashed her own way in, no shortcut, no line-jumping.

Well after all that, after her first, critically acclaimed work came out, she met and had a relationship with a well-established writer. It didn’t work out, and they broke up.

And immediately, I mean IMMEDIATELY, the message boards were filled with people posting how she had broken in because ‘her boyfriend is famous,’ and much, much worse allegations (I’m sure you can guess what people were implying, but I won’t even fucking say it here, it’s so vile).

Now, I want to get this out because this will bother me forever. Here is a talented women, a gifted writer, who broke in the VERY VERY hardest way possible, on her own, in an industry where female writers were almost unheard of, and because of her talent, she became a favorite of many editors, pros and readers right away.

Do you know how hard that is? The odds are astronomical, but she did it with hard work and talent.

And these people wanted to dismiss her, diminish her achievements, so they made up this myth that she got work through a boyfriend she hadn’t even MET yet.

That’s the mindset that is out there, still, in some quarters. You don’t have to look very far to see people out there still believe this about Devin and many other writers, particularly those who are not white, cis, straight and male. 

It bothers me tremendously because it’s unjust, it’s theft of a person’s achievements and reputation.

If I’d come in as someone’s mentored project, I believe that would still be a stigma attached to my name to this day. I’ve seen it happen many times.

But more than that, I want my successes and failures to be my own, to belong to me.I didn’t want to jump the line that others had been working hard at for years.

I hope that makes sense.